第12章 The Grandfather's Book

The workshop was thirty feet long and the roof went up to nothing in the middle, and at seven on a Saturday morning the only light in it came off the plate on the brick where his grandfather had worked and where Miles worked now. He had the fire going by seven every morning from the September he was sixteen, the year his father told him the bench was his to keep, and Miles had understood at once that this was not a gift. His father came in at ten past. His father came in on Saturdays at ten past, and he did not say good morning, and he put his hand flat on the plate on the way past to see whether it was hot enough, and it was always hot enough. The strongbox was under the bench at the far end, where the floor dips and the water comes up in February. It was a steel chest the size of a footlocker with a lid that had been sealed shut with grease and a padlock the size of a plum, and Miles had walked over it twice a month for nine years. He had the pry bar out of the rack. He had it under the hasp with his knee on the lid and his weight behind it when his father said, from six feet away, "Leave it." The bar came off the hasp and hit the concrete and the sound went all the way up into the roof and Miles felt it in his teeth. "Jack," his father said. He did not use the name. He never used the name. "What is in there." "It is a box." "It is a chest with a lock on it that has been in that room since before you were born." His father crossed to the bench and put both hands flat on it and looked at the brick and not at him. "I have not opened it because my father put it there and then he died in the winter and left me a bench, and I have not opened it in twenty years because every time I have wanted to I have been able to hear him telling me not to be a fool about it." Miles got up off the floor with his hands shaking, which annoyed him more than anything else in the whole morning. "He built a bridge," he said. His father took his hands off the bench and turned round. "Down at the bend." "Yes. Fifty years ago, or near it. There is a footbridge in the shallows at the bend below Cold Spring with a lantern hooked under the deck that he put there himself, and my grandfather's J is the J on the letter that has been under the last dry plank for eleven years, and I have found it, and she has found it, and we have been writing to each other over it since August, and I am telling you now because I am not going to do it twice." The workshop was very quiet. The fire made the noise it made. Outside, a lorry went up the mill road. "How old is she," his father said. "Seventeen." "Seventeen," his father said, and put one hand over his eyes for about two seconds, and then took it away again and it was as though it had not happened. "Where does she live?" "East bank. Below the square." "A Ormerod girl?" "No." "Then she is nobody," his father said, in a tone with no malice anywhere in it, which was worse than malice. "There is one road out of Merrow and it goes north, and the plan goes north, and everything I have done since your grandfather died has been pointed at that road. You can have the girl or you can have the road. You will not get to walk between them for fifty years and find out which one you would rather have had." "I am telling you about a bridge." "You are telling me about a bridge you have been walking to at two in the morning for eleven weeks." His father wiped his hands on his apron, which he did not need to do, which they both knew. "Go to the bend. I am not going to stop you and I am not going to help you. But do not bring it here. Whatever you have found down there, you keep it out of this house, and you keep it away from me, because I have a bench to hold and I have not got the hands for a second thing." He went out through the roller door at a quarter past ten and did not look back, and Miles stood in the smell of hot metal with the pry bar on the concrete at his feet. He got the hasp off at half past two, when the fire was down and the shed was empty. The grease inside it was hard as a stone. The lid came up on one stiff hinge and the smell that came out was camphor and rust and cold paper. A coffee tin of three-inch nails. Two coils of copper wire. Nine keys with paper labels gone to pulp. A pair of goggles with one lens starred. Underneath all of that, flat against the bottom, a book. It was school exercise book shaped, bound in tooled leather the colour of a chestnut, with a spine that had been mended twice with a strip of boot leather. On the flyleaf somebody had written the owner's name and then rubbed it out, and you could still read the shape of it in the grain. Inside the front cover there was a tin of boot polish. It had been used on the book. The book had been kept. On the first page, in a hand that was nothing like his father's and everything like the J in the bottle, it said: the bridge at the bend below Cold Spring, built for the one I let go. Miles read it on the bench with the fire out and his gloves off and his hands going numb, and he read it again, and then he started at the beginning and did not stop for two hours. The book was ruled down the left-hand margin in inches and it was a builder's book. Every entry had a date and a number. 4 March, posts in, river low, R holding the tape. 2 April, span closed, R on the far bank with the lamp, R on the near bank with the lamp, the lamp is a hurricane lamp and it does not want to be carried, R says carry it anyway. 30 April, ropes dressed, the crossing tried by both of us and nobody else, and it is eleven feet and the middle is soft and must be roped off until it dries. R. Twenty-six entries in the first year, and the R had a hand as careful as the J and slightly slanted the other way, and the letters leaned towards each other across the page. Miles read every one of them twice. In April, R wrote out the weather for him because he had cut his hand and could not hold the pen. Once, in June, he had written under his own tally: she says the middle plank is a liar and it will go on a wet day, and if it does, I will say I told you so in front of whoever is here. The last eleven entries were all in September and October and the R had stopped appearing in them. The handwriting changed in the last one, and it was shorter, and it was the handwriting of a man writing to himself with nobody to write to. 14 September. The road at the mill is under two feet. They have told the men the culvert is the council's business. 29 September. Water at the third stringer. Took the tools and the tape off the far bank and got them across at dusk. It went at four in the morning. 11 October. The council has had a map made. The bend is on it as a bend. No bridge. No house at the bend. Both of those are the same decision, and it was made upstairs by men who have never had a reason to walk down there. If the bridge is not on the map then it was never built, and if it was never built then the house at the bend was never there, and R can be put down with the rest of the flood. 29 October. I have written to R. I have put it where she would find it if she ever came back down this bank. That is a foolish thing to do and I have done it anyway, because a thing that is written down is a thing that somebody can be wrong about, and I have spent fifty-one years being a man nobody can be wrong about. He wrote that in the last year of his life, the November before he died, and the date in the margin said so, and the J on the bottle said the same. The last written page was the one after that. On the front of it, in the same heavy careful letters, it said: the bridge is not for crossing, it is for holding. Whoever finds it, keep it. The back of that last leaf had been gummed shut. A strip of brown paper had been laid across the fold and run with gum and pressed flat, and somebody had written on the strip in a small hand: for whoever finds it. J. Miles put his thumbnail under the strip and it lifted. He stopped. He sat with his hand flat on the open book for a long minute in the cold shed with the dead fire in the grate. Then he closed the book, and put it inside his coat, and shut the lid of the chest, and went to tell her there was nothing in it that she would want.